No Glory and Specialness

The mind loves the idea of enlightenment being some kind of distant, virtually unobtainable, perfect place of permanent bliss, free from suffering and full of omniscience, omnipresence and lots of other important ‘omni’s’ stomping around, shouting the odds and saving the world. And of course, because all this glory and specialness has to be attained, it seems there has to be a long haul through the dark night of the soul, endless past karmas, original sin, right-thinking, right action and preparation for the bardos. “It is a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Yet Natural Being is such an ordinary and gentle constant. When it is seen it is. When it is avoided it is. It requires no effort and demands no standards. Being timeless there is no path to tread, no debt to pay. When this is heard and confusion collapses, when the contraction of struggling to get something falls away and the vibrant energy of being aliveness becomes apparent, something else is seen, very naturally of course, because it is already all that is. - Tony Parsons